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Heathcote's techniques in the classroom, the pedagogy of drama, are explained in this book, along with analyses of her improvisations with young people. The author's goal is to share with teachers how they, using Heathcote's methods, can generate significant learning experiences.
What does it mean to be "an excellent teacher?" To Dorothy Heathcote, one of this century's most respected educational innovators, it means seeing one's pupils as they really are, shunning labels and stereotypes. It means taking risks: putting aside one's comfortable, doctrinaire role and participating fully in the learning process. Above all, it means pushing oneself and one's students to the outer limits of capability--often, with miraculous results. In this lively collection of essays and talks from 1967-80, Heathcote shares the findings of her groundbreaking work in the application of theater techniques and play to classroom teaching. She provides a time-tested philosophy on the value of dramatic activity in breaking down barriers and overcoming inertia. Her insistence that teachers must step down from their pedestals and immerse themselves in the possibility of the moment makes for magical and challenging reading.
Dorothy Heathcote MBE was a unique educator whose practice had a vital influence on the international development of Drama in Education. For more than half a century she inspired generations of teachers and educators all over the world by her original and authentic approach to teaching and learning. This new collection of the essential writings of Dorothy Heathcote traces the development of her practice over her long professional life. It combines the most important and influential articles from the first edition with more recent pieces to show the significant development in Heathcote’s thinking and practice. The book reveals the increasing complexity of her engagement with Mantle of the Expert as an approach to the curriculum and revisits earlier themes that are central to her work in such pieces as Productive Tension and Internal Coherence. In everything she writes she is concerned with introducing teachers to the power of drama as a means of activating the curriculum and giving them the insight and understanding to enable them to generate significant learning experiences with their students. Each section is accompanied by an introduction, a summary of key points and an extensive list of resources. Edited by a leading expert in drama education and featuring a Foreword by Gavin Bolton, this new collection of Dorothy Heathcote’s work will be welcomed by academics, teachers of drama, and student teachers.
Dorothy Heathcote is the most public drama teaching figure in the world. She has taught classes of children in five continents. The numbers must run into millions. In addition, innumerable teachers have watched her teach in person or on video and television. How did someone who left secondary school at 14 become a world authority? Bolton describes Dorothy Heathcote's upbringing, her work as a mill girl, her theatre training, her unprecedented appointment to Durham and Newcastle Universities and her extraordinary rise to fame. He examines the basis for her genius and shows how being a wife and mother contributed to her work.
Drama Worlds examines the complex improvised event called process drama and identifies it as an essential part of today's theatre. Cecily O'Neill considers process drama's sources and its connections with more familiar kinds of improvisation: the texts it generates, the kinds of roles available, its relation to its audience and dramatic time, and the leader's function in the event. She provides examples of several process dramas and identifies dramatic strategies and characteristics. The explicit associations between theatre form and process drama make O'Neill's approach accessible and its purposes and possibilities easy to understand, particularly to those working in actor training and theatre. Teachers and directors alike will discover effective ways of initiating and maintaining the drama world, achieving a significant dramatic experience for all participants.
Mantle of the Expert is a form of inquiry learning developed by Dorothy Heathcote that includes drama for learning-so it's active, embodied, imaginative, and aesthetic. It's agentic in that it positions learners as responsible, competent co-constructors of meaning and allows them powers to influence, make decisions, and grapple with complex problems. It situates learning within authentic imagined worlds in ways that are safe and have real-world implications and meaning. It provides opportunities to develop all the key competencies and learning dispositions while facilitating deep learning across a range of curriculum areas.
Role-play has escaped from the drama studio and established itself as one of the most effective learning techniques across the curriculum, and it is also a crucial component of most management training. This book explains how to use it well.
